Stable Marriage of Students (completed)

Starting Date: AnytimeDuration: 100 hoursTime commitment: To suit. Not end July or early August.Prerequisites: Proficient programmer. Good at Maths

Constraint Satisfaction and the final year projects system

Prof Cohen is a world leading researcher in the theory and practice of constraints and has written some tools for the department that need to be improved.

At Royal Holloway, we allocate students to projects and staff as supervisors of those projects using a semi-automated process, using a C++ library called Lemon that solves the problem as a network flow optimization. This is fine except that it does not work if students have different workloads (MSc, half unit etc.,)

Another program using the same technology that we require will allocate final year project students to their demo times. Each student has a supervisor and a second marker and both must attend the demo. However, each staff member should attend at most two demo sessions. At present this is solved using the minizinc language (http://www.minizinc.org/) and different solvers. Different state-of-the-art solvers give enormously different solution times (from seconds to weeks)

Your job would be to automate the system and compare different solvers including gecode, Google Tool and Chuffed, and different models (formulations of the problem).